1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the systems and methods described herein relate to applying custom lead generation criteria.
2. Description of the Related Art
Consumer lead generation is a large and growing industry. The lead generation industry identifies individual or business consumers that may be interested in buying products or services and sells contact information for those consumers to providers of the products or services. For example, a residential loan lead generation company, such as LowerMyBills.com, identifies consumers interested in getting a residential loan and sells the consumers' contact information to lenders of residential loans. Contact information or other information about a potentially interested buyer that a vendor may use to try to engage in a transaction with the potentially interested buyer is known as a “lead.”
Lead generation companies sell leads for many products and services, including residential loans, commercial loans, real estate agents, automobiles, attorneys, housecleaners, and many other products and services. Providers of such products and services buy leads because leads effectively identify consumers that are already interested in the providers' products and services. Accordingly, leads often result in more sales than advertising, cold calling, or other forms of salesmanship.
Some lead generation systems use standard criteria to match consumers with vendors. Standard criteria are generally available to multiple vendors to specify what kinds of leads the vendors want to receive from a lead generation system. Examples of standard criteria include geographic information such as city and state. In many systems, multiple vendors can use geographic criteria to specify, for example, that the vendors want to receive leads of consumers in particular geographic areas. While some lead generation systems have used such standard criteria, lead generation systems have not provided adequate mechanisms for a particular vendor to use custom criteria customized for use by the particular vendor.